The hidden truth, p.28
The Hidden Truth, page 28
‘Sara?’ He sounded breathless.
‘Hi,’ she said, detecting the wobble in her voice.
‘How are you?’
Hearing him made her heart feel as if it would burst from her chest. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s been busy …’
‘You must be missing Margaret.’
Sara felt tears choke her. ‘How are you?’ she managed to ask, ignoring his words.
There was a moment’s silence, then Bernard said, ‘Yeah, OK … although there’s still no news.’
‘And Adam?’
‘He’s getting there. Seeing a therapist at last, you’ll be glad to hear. And he’s started a course in computer something-or-other. To do with gaming.’
She nodded, although he couldn’t see her.
‘Sara, listen –’
‘Don’t, Bernard. Please,’ she interrupted what she knew would be an apology, aware that the more he talked, the more she would be drawn in.
There was a moment’s silence. Then he said, ‘Is it really over? Is there no way back for us?’
She didn’t reply. She couldn’t.
‘I haven’t called you because I didn’t want to intrude after Margaret’s death.’ There was a pause. ‘And because I’m ashamed of how I treated you.’ Another pause. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Still she said nothing.
‘Could we meet up? I really miss you.’
Sara felt an agony of hesitation. ‘You’ve still got a lot on your plate with Adam, Bernard. You should concentrate on that.’ She knew she sounded distant, but if she put even an ounce of feeling into her words, she would cry … And perhaps capitulate.
Bernard groaned. ‘God, Sara, please. Just a coffee … half an hour?’
‘I can’t see you, Bernard.’ As she said what she’d planned to say, she felt her body rebel. She began to shake, her heart hammering, her guts churning. It was like it was shouting, ‘For God’s sake, woman, get to that café. Sit with him, look into his eyes, remember what you mean to each other.’ But her pragmatic brain overrode her body, forcing her to remember what it was like in the house on the cliff. Adam was clearly moving forward. But that didn’t mean he would welcome her back. And their future still hung in the balance.
She breathed through another loaded silence, then heard Bernard clear his throat.
‘The bottom line is … you’re simply the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Sara.’
His dull, defeated acceptance of her decision thudded leaden on her ears. The urge to run to him at that very moment tugged at her like an impatient child. For a split second, she wavered. ‘I hope things work out for you and the family, Bernard,’ she said, through her tears.
As she clicked off, she heard him calling her name in a long-drawn-out sigh. Still shaking, she realized she hadn’t mentioned the stuff she’d left in his house. And neither had he. But she was too distressed to call him back.
52
Adam’s request came as a shock to Bernard. He’d seen a change in his son, starting from the time he’d thought he’d seen Ilsa outside the window – which coincided with the start of his sessions with Janet Bairstow. After just a few appointments, it was clear that Adam revered his therapist. He might come home unsettled by the hour with her, but it was obviously helping. Now he was starting to be able to talk to Bernard about the past with a modicum of understanding and perspective.
His son said to him one day, as they were toasting bagels for breakfast, ‘Janet thinks it could help to talk to Maria’s husband – if he’ll let me.’ Adam had searched his father’s face. ‘She says it might be good if you came too. I didn’t think you’d want to. I’m going anyway, but I’d rather go with you.’ Bernard, in spite of hearing the request like a knife to his throat, had felt he had no choice but to agree.
Is this madness? Bernard wondered, as they approached the house in the Hastings suburb – the appointment negotiated by a police family liaison officer, whom Paul Kemp had insisted need not be present. He was feeling nauseous, the coffee he’d drunk in nervy gulps earlier repeating on him unpleasantly. He glanced across at his son as he drew up in the silent close. It was nearly eleven in the morning and the place was deserted. Adam looked clean and smart and incredibly tense. But there was a light in his eye that Bernard had not seen in a while: determination.
‘OK?’ Bernard asked, inhaling slowly in an attempt to unknot his stomach. He reached over and gave his son’s thigh a comforting nudge.
Adam shot him an apprehensive look, but didn’t reply, just undid his seatbelt and opened the car door.
The jolly ding-dong of the doorbell seemed completely at odds with their mission. Bernard thought they probably looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses or men from the council to any neighbours twitching their nets. The frosted-glass panels of the door showed a passing shadow, but at first there was no sound from inside. Maybe he’s changed his mind, Bernard thought – indeed hoped.
Adam glanced at him, whispered, ‘Shall I ring again?’
Bernard shook his head. ‘He’s in there,’ he mouthed silently.
Finally, the glass filled with a looming figure and the door was slowly pulled open.
Paul Kemp was in his mid-thirties, tall and thin, with floppy brown hair and pale eyes behind rimless glasses. His expression was hardly welcoming, his mouth a thin line, eyes blinking nervously. ‘Come in,’ he said, standing back.
As they hovered in silence in the small, featureless hall of the new build – a couple of prints of boats in a harbour, a square mirror in a bobbly, sea-blue glass frame, cream-painted walls – Bernard took control.
Holding out his hand to Paul, he introduced himself, then Adam.
Paul stiffened, his hand barely connecting with Bernard’s before he withdrew it quickly. For Bernard, Paul Kemp was the poster boy for his crime. The living victim. Seeing him in the flesh was strange. He had grown in Bernard’s memory all these years, taken on a strength and power that the man in front of them did not possess.
The kitchen, into which Paul herded them, was equally bland, with French windows leading onto a garden that was barely more than a patch of recently sown grass surrounded by a woven-wood fence, looking as raw as the lawn.
Seeing his gaze, Paul said, ‘We’ve only been here a short while.’
Bernard noticed toys in the corner, a child’s iPad, a plastic bowl piled with ponytail holders and hairclips on the table. He felt a pang for the motherless child.
‘Sit,’ Paul said curtly, indicating they should take the other chairs at the round kitchen table. ‘I won’t offer you tea. This shouldn’t take long.’
All the carefully rehearsed speeches Bernard had prepared went clean out of his head. He looked at his son and took a big breath. ‘Thank you for seeing us,’ he began.
‘Yeah, well …’ Paul didn’t finish and Bernard wondered why he had allowed them to come. He didn’t have to.
Adam, sitting ramrod straight, began to talk. ‘We wanted to come in person, to apologize … to let you know how truly sorry we are.’ His voice shook slightly as he went on. ‘For both the accident, and how we handled it afterwards. What we did was wrong on every level and we’ve regretted it every single day since.’ Another shaky breath. ‘Maybe this doesn’t help – nothing will bring your wife back – but we wanted to tell you how sorry we both are.’
Adam’s speech was clearly practised, and although his voice trembled, he seemed oddly calm. Which was far from how Bernard was feeling.
Paul was staring into space, his hands fiddling with a green felt tip he’d picked up from the table. When he looked up, his eyes were hard. ‘If you’re looking for forgiveness …’
‘We’re not,’ Bernard stated.
Paul turned his gaze to him. ‘You’re a good liar,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Although I’m sure you were incredibly sorry for what you’d done when you stood up and spouted all that remorse. Must have been a nightmare.’ He let out a long breath. ‘But imagine what it feels like to be me, OK? A person’s wife dying is terrible enough, but then the people responsible concoct a bunch of lies, manipulate the tragedy to suit themselves?’ He stared hard at Bernard, making him cringe. ‘I thought I knew the truth about how Maria died. It was all I was asking for. But now you and your son, here, have completely changed the story.’
Bernard nodded. ‘I understand what you’re saying. And you’re right. I did a very stupid thing in the heat of the moment. It was absolutely and totally wrong.’
‘“Stupid”? It was more than fucking stupid, mate. It was criminal.’ Paul’s tone was no longer restrained. ‘Protecting your precious boy here.’ He shot a contemptuous glance at Adam. ‘So he gets to live his nice, cosy life and takes no fucking responsibility for his recklessness.’ He shook his head. ‘Maria never got that chance.’
Silence. Bernard was aware of the thrashing in his gut.
Then Adam spoke up again. ‘If it’s any consolation, it’s been a living hell from the moment I killed her.’ Bernard cringed at his blunt choice of words, but his son hadn’t finished. ‘There is not a single day, hour or minute when I don’t relive that terrible image of her lying on the road, not moving.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I dream about her. I wonder all the time what she would have been doing now, what she would have made of her life. I think of your daughter … you.’ He stopped, gathered his breath. ‘I live, she doesn’t. That will haunt me till the day I die.’ Adam’s eyes misted, but he blinked the tears away. ‘There is not even a small part of my life that is “nice” or “cosy”, that is not overshadowed by what I did …’ He shook his head, attempted to speak again, then raised his hand to indicate he had finished.
Paul, barely seeming to have heard Adam, looked straight ahead at the far wall, where children’s paintings were Blu-Tacked in messy rows, twisting the pen angrily in his fingers as if he might snap it. He must be living with someone new and had another child, Bernard decided, as Paul’s daughter had already been four when the accident happened, and these were drawings from a much younger hand.
‘You people,’ Paul started again, his voice rasping. ‘You get away with anything because you know the right call to make, know how to manipulate the system. You should both be rotting in jail.’
That might still happen, Bernard thought grimly. Although, as the weeks went on, it began to feel – mistakenly, perhaps – as if the threat were fading. Might not the CPS have jumped on it sooner, if they intended to prosecute? He didn’t know. But Paul’s anger was escalating. It was time to go. Nothing would be gained by hanging around, waiting for him to punch one of them in the face.
He got up, abruptly. Adam looked momentarily taken aback but followed suit. Addressing Paul, Bernard said, ‘Listen, thank you. You did a very generous thing, allowing us to come.’
Paul seemed surprised they were leaving, too. His face still flushed from his outburst, he shot up, then stood there, blinking even faster behind his glasses. He seemed desperate to say something else, but just continued to stare at them in bottled-up silence. Bernard held out his hand. Paul didn’t take it this time, his own hands crossed and pressed firmly under each armpit. Bernard could almost see the unspoken words inflating the man in front of him like air in a balloon.
Searching his face, he saw the tears before Paul seemed aware of them himself.
Into the silence, Paul said, his voice choked, ‘It was partly my fault.’
Bernard felt Adam start in surprise by his side.
Paul covered his face with his hands, obviously trying to smother his sobs. When he looked up, his expression was pure devastation. ‘I lied as well. To the court. I said I hadn’t spoken to her since she left to go on the ride.’ He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Which was technically true. I didn’t speak to her because she didn’t pick up. But I called her … what, ten times? I never mentioned that.’
Bernard frowned, but Paul was still talking. ‘We had this row. Just a stupid thing about Becky’s pick-ups. But she slammed out the door in a mood. So I called her … over and over … wanting to make peace.’ He stopped again, overcome. ‘Her phone was smashed, so I don’t know if she was finally going to answer me … but I think that’s why she stopped. If she hadn’t, maybe you wouldn’t have hit her. Maybe she’d have been well past the spot by then.’ He threw his arms into the air. ‘If only I’d waited till she got home instead of nagging her … She never knew I was sorry … She never knew. You’re the one who killed her, of course, but I’ll never know if I contributed to her death by calling so persistently.’
The three men seemed set in stone in the chilly, neat kitchen as Paul’s words sank in. Bernard understood Paul beating himself up: he’d experienced similar torment himself over Ilsa’s death. And, in truth, any accident was a couple of seconds, a couple of feet, a split-second decision from a different outcome. But his son had still swerved onto the wrong side of the road.
Adam moved forward. Bernard thought he might be about to embrace Paul. But he stopped short. Instead, he reached out and grazed the man’s sleeve with a sympathetic hand.
Paul saw them into the hall without a word. But this was a very different silence. As he opened the door, Paul picked up his wallet from where it lay on the ledge under the blue-framed mirror. As they watched, he pulled out a dog-eared photograph, gazing at it for a moment before turning it so Adam could see. It was of a pretty brunette with large brown eyes and an engaging smile.
‘Maria,’ he said simply. ‘Please … try to remember her like this and not lying dead on that sodding road.’
Bernard had no idea how he got home. They drove in complete silence, both men knocked for six, holding their breath until they were safely clear of the house. They were in shock. The visit had gone some way, however, towards laying a ghost. Paul, it was clear, had survived, moved on as much as he ever would. He had a new family. He was not the shell of a man Bernard had observed in the courtroom.
‘Talk later?’ he said to Adam, as they pulled up at the cliff house. ‘Think I’ll go down to the beach, walk off some of the tension.’
Adam glanced at his father anxiously. ‘It was helpful, wasn’t it, Dad?’
‘For me? Absolutely … I was so proud of you in there.’
After a long sigh, his son said quietly, ‘It’s been the most important day of my life.’
The beach was peopled by windswept dog-owners and their pets, but otherwise empty – no one he had to smile at or to whom he should say hello, thank goodness.
As he crunched across the stones in the soft spring air, he found all thoughts of the morning’s visit were driven out, replaced by a vivid, pulsing memory: Sara, naked in his arms in the cold, midnight sea. He physically jerked as he felt again the aching sweetness of her bare skin beneath the waves, so soft and smooth against his fingers. Walking faster, he tried to dispel the image. It would do him no good. That door, as she’d made clear in her phone call, was firmly shut. He had nothing to offer her, anyway.
Bernard walked on, forcing his thoughts – painful as they were – back to Maria’s husband. ‘You should both be rotting in jail.’ The man’s words echoed around his mind. He had never visited a prison. Like many others, he’d seen plenty of grim images on the news or in film and television dramas. He’d tried on a number of occasions to imagine himself locked into a cell, on a rickety metal bunk, with an open toilet, sharing the cramped, probably Victorian space with another convict – who might be at best annoying, at worst violent or nuts – although Naz had said his so-called ‘white-collar’ crime would probably mean he’d serve any sentence somewhere like Ford open prison in Sussex, with all the suave conmen and money-launderers. Liars, just like him.
Adam always shrugged his shoulders when Bernard brought up court and prison. He didn’t seem to care. In his son’s mind, it was clear the worst had already happened.
He was tired, he realized, to the very bottom of his soul. It was as if he’d been primed and on the alert for months now – ever since the night Carrie had phoned about Adam. Never quite resting, never completely switching off. Even further back than that, he knew he’d felt no real peace of mind since before Ilsa died. The family secret and subsequent dislocation from the twins had edited, tinged, skewed all his exchanges. Especially with Sara. Why didn’t I come clean with her, right from the start? It was as if he’d just accepted the lies as part of the fabric of his daily life, like a chronic condition.
But now, in the light of the meeting with Paul Kemp, he felt the faint, unfamiliar stirrings of hope. He was still reeling from it, of course. Even if a ghost had been partially laid, reliving that terrible day in Paul’s presence had shaken him, Adam too. But as he stepped over a slimy wooden groin and into a shallow pool of seawater, damp seeping through his trainers to his socks, he was aware that today had been a sort of progress, however small, for them both. They had faced their demons. There was other progress, too. Scattering Ilsa’s ashes was now a plan to which both the twins had agreed. Adam was clearly loving his new direction towards gaming. It was only the absence of Sara in his life that left a smarting rupture in his hope.
53
‘I’m thinking of going away,’ Sara told Peggy over the phone. ‘With the money from Granny, I thought maybe I’d take a few months off, go travelling. Margaret suggested I should, before she died. She wanted me to have an adventure, she said.’
Peggy laughed. ‘You sound like an excited gap-year student, Mum. What about your clients?’
‘I can sort them out … leave at the beginning of May, perhaps.’
‘Where would you go?’
‘Well, I’d start in California with Joni, do the trip I had to cancel because of Granny – be there for her birthday. Then work my way up the coast: Big Sur, Yosemite, San Francisco … places I’ve always wanted to see.’ The family had spent their holidays exclusively in Europe when Pete was alive. Places to which they could drive in his van, ignore his phobia of planes.
